June 29, 2022 • 42 mins
For years, Dan Jordan was Ervil LeBaron’s right-hand man. But by the time Ervil was imprisoned, the relationship between the two men had soured and Dan Jordan was marked for death in the Book of the New Covenant. In the autumn of 1987, Utah law enforcement are called to investigate a mysterious hunting incident involving Dan Jordan, and a campground full of Ervil LeBaron’s children. But will they be able to put the pieces together?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:06):
Novel. A listener note this episode contains violence and content
that some listeners might find distressing. Previously, on deliver Us
from Herbal Hebrew, the mantle fell on him and he
(00:27):
did not sign up for it. Everybody was a crazy, little,
freaking spartan extremist terrorist, not knowing anything else in the world.
Shooting the guns is not the traumatic part. The traumatic
part is that you're actually going to be faced with
a major war and you might have to shoot people,
(00:47):
so you can't have any kind of feelings. You can
have any soft feelings. I just remember the gun pointing
at me, seeing the gun, and he said, give me
your money, and I emptied my or and put all
the money in there, including my die pack, which he
told me not to do. Heber felt he had screwed
up so bad when he had the authority, he gave
(01:09):
the authority to the next Brethren line Mo also called Aaron.
He was the one that was like the moral compass
for us, studying hard and praying and making sure we
were well verse in our own doctrine. This is God's law.
We have to do it, otherwise the whole world will
(01:30):
go to hell like the Armageddon. Satan will win in
the end if we don't do this. We're in Old Harbor, Washington,
(01:50):
about ninety miles north of Seattle, on an island called
Woodbey Island. We're specifically at a location called pam Cove.
We have the wonderful water view these days. Steve Voteci
lives way out in Washington State. On clear days, you
can see the Olympic Mountains over there. You can see
Commano Island over there. With a glass of wine on
(02:13):
the deck. Here they watch the sunset just be bright red.
It's it's a beautiful time. Looking around his home on
the water's edge, I see his deck a picture window
where you can spot orca is in the bay. Sometimes
a great well bald headed eagles visit to feeding on
clams and on the walls of his home, old family
(02:34):
snapshots and mementos from his life. Uh, what do I have, hero,
there's me. It's five years old. The atmosphere here feels peaceful, serene,
that is until he shows me a picture from his
past life back in the nineties. This is my jail
mug shot to establish my credentials as an unsavory character. Yeah,
(02:58):
that's me, Steve. Even prison overalls, but he wasn't really
a convict. He was an undercover cop. As you run
into somebody, other investigators would take this out and show
just to some people who were trying to target inside.
If you're saying this guy, okay, I've got a love
with you, it's quite hard to imagine any amount of
(03:20):
undercover shape shifting could turn Steve into a convincing unsavory character.
No offense to Steve, but his manner is well, I
don't know, kind of cuddly. In fact, it's like his home, warm, welcoming.
Occasionally you spot a little knowing twinkle in his eye,
(03:42):
like the light catching on the pencove water. I think
it was his demeanor rather than his disguises, that made
Steve so good at his job. People opened up to him,
wanted to talk like they just couldn't help themselves, which
was a real asset in his role working investigations for
(04:05):
the Organized Crime Bureau in Utah. And so you think, oh, Utah,
j they can't much crime in Utah, But the polygamous
met the definition of organized crime. What Steve is talking
about here is that underground network of polygamous communities that
I've mentioned in previous episodes, the ones that had shot
(04:29):
up like weeds around the same time hervil LeBaron was
also building his cult. They were the groups hervill coveted
and wanted to consume, and who were frankly much more
successful at quietly going about their work. I've spent much
of my career reporting on these Mormon fundamentalist communities, their
groups with their own hierarchies, rules, and rituals operating in
(04:52):
the shadows, and by the eighties, some of these groups
weren't just engaging in the crime of polygamy. Some were
committing viole crimes. Part of Steve's job as a cop
was to keep tabs on the various polygamust sex in Utah.
He's not a Mormon himself, but it didn't seem to matter.
(05:13):
People often seem to want to talk to Steve despite themselves.
It was working this job in that Steve got a
call from his bosses asking him to visit a polygamist,
yet another self styled prophet. There were some threats made
against Dan Jordan's and so I went out to his
(05:33):
home to interview him. Dan Jordan's once hervil Le Baron's
right hand man, the man who had killed Joel le
Baron at rbl's orders and started off the whole spiral
of the Colt. In his career investigating Mormon polygamus, Steve
had heard all about the infamous and now deceased Hervil
(05:54):
LeBaron from the perspective of most law enforcement. At this
point in the mid eight d's, his cult had been
shut down, Hervil was already becoming a kind of historical curiosity,
and so here was an opportunity to go sort of
interview one of the lieutenants of rural LeBaron and just
(06:15):
see what the set up was. Daniel ben Jordan's was
a short and stout man with a fleshy face, receding hairline,
dark dead eyes. He was fifty six and eighty five,
but he was the kind of man that had always
looked kind of middle aged, even in his early twenties
(06:38):
when he first arrived in colonial le Baron as one
of those French but not actually French missionaries, the new
blood whose appearance would energize the town. Back then, I've
heard he was always at Hervil side, but by the
time Irvill was arrested in nineteen seventy nine, though their
families were bound by marriages. Dan had started a question
(07:00):
and if Herville really did carry the mantle of the
one mighty and Strong one. Cervill was safely locked up,
that is, and when Herville was convicted their schism had
grown into a full blown split. Dan incorporated his own
church to Erville. He'd become a son of Perdition. His
(07:21):
name entered into the Book of the New Covenant's hit list.
Dan has been described to me as coming across as
a joyless man, someone who, apart from Hervil back in
the day, had few friends, a loner. But when Steve
arrived to meet him that day, it wasn't just Dan's
(07:44):
awkward demeanor that stood out on the surface. Everything seemed
just like the polygamous community Steve had spent his career visiting,
but the atmosphere felt off. I go into the charge
hall and they're probably about five or six young ladies there,
(08:04):
which we didn't do introductions, but I'm assuming that there
were his various wives. There were a number of children
there also, and it's just a little strange. I've been
to other families, and I mean there might be kids
in another room playing or something like that and laughing,
and I just sat down with Dan Jordan's and interviewed
in him and nobody's laughing, nobody's playing. It's just kind
(08:25):
of a strange setup. I mean, you go into home
and there's ten or fifteen children there, you'd expect there's
some laughter, maybe see some toys, but no, none of
that was there. And obviously everyone's been coached to not
talk to me. Steve quickly realized that getting good information
out of Dan was going to be difficult, but he
(08:47):
assumed the death threats Dan had been getting were something
to do with his history with Herville. I knew about
his background, and then I'm in there and I it's
like I'm dealing with a con man. I mean, I'm
asking questions and his answers are carefully weighed, and and
he's presenting the attitude of oh, there's no problem. This
is just some sort of normal setup. He's in control,
(09:10):
and so nobody's gonna bump him off like everyone else
in Herbal's colt, Dan Jordan's never talked to cops, not
about anything he thought might be useful to them. Anyway.
Four years had passed since VAL's death. Maybe he didn't
feel like his name appearing in the Book of the
(09:30):
New Covenant put him at risk anymore. My takeaway was
I didn't feel like there was a threat, and he
didn't really seem worried. So Dan wasn't worried, Steve wasn't worried.
Dust your hands off and move on. I felt like
I had made some connections, passed out my name, and
(09:51):
part of the ideas that things go bad later on
a least know somebody he could call um. But I
mean he never called. You have to say, in hindsight,
both Steve and Dan got it wrong that day, because
the next call Steve would get about Dan Jordan's was
to tell him he'd been shot to death from the
(10:17):
teams at Novel and I Heart Radio. This is deliver
Us from Herville, episode ten, the Book of Daniel. For
(10:37):
a man who had spent decades on the run, Bennett,
Colorado seemed like a nice, quiet place to settle down.
Situated in eastern Colorado, It's about thirty miles from Denver,
with the range of the Rocky Mountains jutting up into
the sky if you look west to the east, the
prairies and flat lands of the American Heartland. Dan Jordan
(11:00):
there after Ervil's death in and set up another one
of his appliance repair shops, which operated uneventfully for years.
Dan might have thought he could put the whole Labaron
saga behind him. Well, maybe not completely behind him, because
after Irvil's death he had given shelter to Anime Marston
(11:23):
Evil's fourth wife, and so he had a few of
Herbal LeBaron's children living within his polygamous clan and for
the Kingdom of God back in Mexico. This was a
festering wound, their siblings living with someone marked for death
by the Book of the New Covenant. What of our
(11:43):
lifelong dreams was to get our siblings who were under
Dan's spell. That's the way we saw it, get our siblings.
Editor Gabriella LeBaron and the children and teens of the
Kog deeply missed their siblings. I dreamed of them all
the time that we would be reunited with him. So
(12:04):
they were like our pride and joy in our love,
and we were ready to die for them, and we
were going to do whatever it took to bring him back,
to rescue them from hell and to have them come
and join us a much better hell. In eight seven
Gabriella was eleven years old and together with her brothers
and sisters, she had been scheming and we were going
(12:26):
to go and infiltrate and somehow convinced them to leave
and come back with us, so basically extricate them. This
was early in seven, but over the coming months the
Kog's plan to be permanently reunited with their Labarren siblings
evolved into something darker, albeit with the same ultimate aim.
(12:48):
It was actually Cynthia's idea, and she told Hebrew, and
Hebrew was since it was his job to take everybody
out and he had agreed to it, he had to
take advantage of the opportunity he had. It was a
summer's morning in August of eight seven that Dan Jordans
opened his front door to find seven of hervill La
(13:08):
Baron's children staring back at him. The group included labaronteenes
carrying infants in their arms. Cynthia and the leader of
the Kog, Aaron, Hebrew, Patricia and Gabriella stayed behind in Mexico.
I really wanted to go. I wanted to be a
part of the action so bad, and I wasn't allowed.
(13:32):
Arriving on the Jordan's doorstep, Aaron told Dan a heartbreaking story.
It went something like this. For several years, they've been
living down in Mexico at the Lahoya Ranch, first under
Arthur until he was killed. Now, he told Dan, Hebrew
was in charge, and they've been surviving a sort of
(13:54):
hellscape with gun battles and not enough to eat. If
that wasn't bad enough, Hebrew only thought of himself. He'd
abandoned them on the ranch and they were starving. They
knew Dan Jordan lived in Colorado and didn't know where
else to go. Aaron offered a deal in exchange for
(14:18):
food and shelter. They'd worked for Dan in his appliance
repair sweatshop. Dan Jordan's said, no, this is no, it's
not gonna work. These kids are coming up to do something.
I know how this all works. This is David Schwinderman.
He's a former federal prosecutor. Jordan's killed a couple of
people on Hervil's direction, and in fact, he killed Rubal's brother.
(14:40):
And he said to his wife, he said, book, this
is not gonna work. I know how this works. It's
not gonna be good for me. But Dan's wife persuaded
him to take in the Labaron orphans. After all, she said,
they'd escaped the clutches of hervil's colt and we're now
leading peaceful lives. What kind of leader would he be
(15:01):
if he didn't offer them a safe haven. And besides,
she reminded him this was some free sweatshop labor for
his appliance business, and that swung it because now he's
got more hands to do more work to bring it
more revenue. That's fine with him, because he's all about
the money. He agreed to take the kids in, although
(15:25):
from this point onward he started carrying a loaded nine
millimeter pistol in a shoulder holster just to be safe.
Only took it off to bathe or visit the bathroom.
And despite any suspicions, August, then September and the Jordan
family past uneventfully, the new recruits kept their heads down.
(15:46):
They're working in the family appliance business to bring it
more revenue, to get along. Really well. Everything's going fine
until that autumn, when the whole Jordan clan started getting
ready for a big annual family trip each year. Dan
closed up his repair shop for a few weeks to
go deer hunting. With the family over in Utah. Dan
(16:08):
didn't really want to take the new Labarn tines with them,
but he didn't trust them enough to leave them behind either,
so he decided to take some of them along. They
left on October fifteenth in a caravan, carrying a half
dozen of Dan's wives, fifteen of their children, and the
four oldest of the seven Labarn kids. They drove about
(16:34):
eight hours to the man Ti Lasoul National Forest in
central Utah. Dan picked a campsite not too far from
a dirt road. It was peaceful, surrounded by steep hillsides
on three sides. They gave the campsite the feel of
a sort of natural amphitheater. They set up The hunt
(16:55):
hasn't really started yet. It's to start the next day.
This is on October six. That Friday, the sound of
gun shots were echoing throughout the forest as hunters prepared
for the opening of hunting season. The Jordans were practicing
firing their guns too. At about two pm, Dan left
(17:16):
the family campsite and headed for an area they designated
as the communal bathroom. It was partially shielded from view
by trees. Dan goes off to do his business, drops
his drawers is in the process, and two people walk
(17:38):
up and she's him in the head in the chest
of the nine millimeter weapon. Two shots echo through the forest.
The people of the campsite just here, boom boom, and
they don't think anything of it because it's hunting season,
and they figure it's just somebody's discharged the weapon. But
(18:00):
as time passes, where's Dan. Somebody goes out when Dan
doesn't come back and discovers Dan's body with the bullet
hole in the head and a bull on the chest.
This was clearly no hunting accident. When the police arrive,
they have a mystery on their hands. Someone had murdered Dan,
(18:22):
but who turns out the killer wasn't anyone in Dan's
hunting party. In fact, the culprits didn't come from inside
the camp at all. Eyes had been watching Dan the
whole time, predators stalking their prey, waiting for the perfect
(18:42):
moment to pounce. That's coming up after the break. Two
days after the killing of Dan Jordan's a call came
into the State Police. It reached the desk of Steve Votechi.
(19:06):
My partner and I were down there to Manti. We
go to the crime scene that's out in the forest. Steve,
that gentle investigator for the Organized Crime Bureau in Utah
who had that strange interview with Dan, and now two
years later, he gazed out his squad car window as
his partner drove him to the crime scene. You drive there,
(19:28):
and said, I drive, And then you didn't leave the
paved road, and you drive about five miles on a
turn of her dirt road, and then we're in this
beautiful Champion spot. Votechie was there to investigate a murder,
but in what I've come to learn is his style,
he couldn't help but appreciate how picturesque the landscape was,
(19:48):
with the leaves turning red and bright yellow, the autumn
sun casting a golden light across the mountain. I'm looking
at it and I'm thinking, yes, i s place to camp.
And there was no one there when we got there,
so we're just looking in this beautiful spot and walked around.
There's a little river nearby and and it's really quite pleasant.
(20:10):
We sort of mapped out where we thought a shooter
might have hidden. It's sort of an open campground, and
there was a clumpetraes nearby, and and that we sort
of searched that very very carefully to see what was there.
Steve's initial investigation at the crime scene came up with zilch,
nothing to imply the killing was an inside job from
(20:31):
anyone at the camp, and since everyone had been firing
guns to practice for the hunting trip the next day,
they all had gun residue on their hands. Everyone who
had talked to the cops seemed to have an alibi.
Steve was stumped, but he knew the LeBaron's history felt
(20:53):
like there was more to this case that solving it
was going to require more resources than just the local
count the sheriff's office. So Steve decided to use the
one thing from the crime scene that had made an
impression on him, the beautiful location. It occurred in a
national forest, and then since any possible shooters were out
(21:15):
of state, it becomes obvious that this is an interstate
Dealence interstate, they have the resources to do this. If
you're in federal custody, they can take you anywhere in
the United States, and so it was very useful the
crime occurred on federal land. This enabled the investigation to
operate across the US with additional resources like experienced prosecutors
(21:39):
who knew how to get results in complex cases. That's
how David Schwindermann got involved. They get ahold of the U. S.
Attorney's office and they just said, Hey, Dave, are you
guys interested in is It's going to require more than
just our investigative resources to get this then, so how
about it? Can the FBI help back and you get involved?
(22:01):
So I got involved, and we began to put our
files together, our case together, and that all started to
come together. Then the investigation got a crucial new team member,
Steve knew Dick Forbes. Now, Dick was a specialist of
La Baron in history, so when the techy recognized the names,
(22:23):
he immediately got ahold of Dick. Dick Forbes, you'll remember
from earlier episodes, had played a key role in the
hunt and apprehension of Hervia le Baron, And because no
one knew more about the inner workings of the Colt
than Dick, there was no one who saw them as
a bigger threat. But what's more, Dick knew about the
(22:45):
Book of the New Covenant. A brother of Hervil LeBaron
in Utah had got ahold of a copy and alerted
Dick after reading its distressing contents on vengeance and violent retribution.
Soon now, Dick Forbes started to tell Steve vo Techie
and David Schwinderman just what they were up against. This
(23:07):
isn't just a random shooting. This is probably something to
do with the family. You need to interview all these people,
will get their photographs, will do whatever we need to do.
Will do the investigation. This needs to be done very thoroughly.
Dick Forbes, Steve Votechi, and David Swinderman would now become
the foundation of a crack team formed not just to
(23:30):
solve this cults murders, but to try and stop their
future crimes. Working in unison with the FBI, they were
about to give a fresh focus on the next generation
of Herbal's cult, which Dick had learned from his Labaran sources,
were now calling themselves the Kingdom of God the k
(23:51):
o G. As this investigative team was coming together, the
Jordan's family and the Labyrin teenagers who had joined them
on the hunting trip had all left Utah. It was
October eighteenth. The whole Jordan family the entourage was allowed
to go back to Colorado, and Dan's body was released
(24:14):
and they had the funeral in Colorado. But no sooner
was Dan Jordan in the ground than the Kog tried
to seize control of his clan after the funeral, and
that's where this internal fight kind of starts. With Dan
Jordan's dad, Aaron, the leader of the Kog, declares to
(24:34):
the Jordan family that he is now their leader. He
reveals himself as the one mighty and strong and tells
them they had better fall in line, and the Jordan
family eventually called the cops file a formal complaint against Aaron.
This is all the night of Dan Jordan's funeral, with
Aaron trying to assert his authority as a new patriarch
(24:58):
over everybody. He is reported for domestic abuse by the
family members to authorities in Denver. That's when Aaron's arrested.
With Aaron behind bars, the local cops scoop up the
other Kog members who had been staying with the Jordan's
and they alert David Schwindermann and we then got involved
(25:21):
and brought the kids back to Utah on material witness warrants.
With these Kog kids on material witness warrants, the federal
law enforcement team had access to talk to them. Steve
Otechie started to ask them about the day of Dan's
killing to see if his team could start to piece
(25:41):
together the sequence of events right up to the murder.
And I'm trying to come up with the diagram of
of where all these people were and Dance shot nearer,
where the trailers were camped, where the camper is, and
some people were in the trailer they didn't hear anything,
and other people were outside life sentient Aaron up on
(26:01):
the road. Uh, nobody hears anything suspicious, sees anything suspicious.
Steve starts to get the sense that these children are
not being straight with them. It's obvious that maybe some
statements have been rehearsed, and and I'm writing this all downs,
you know, so that they can be checked later on
in that and I'm just thinking, well, obviously somebody's not
(26:22):
telling the truth. I just can't imagine that nobody heard
any shooting. And it's always amazing that everybody seemed to
be somewhere else and nobody knows what happened whatsoever. Getting
to the bottom of lies was kind of Steve Votechi's forte.
Having spent years under cover, years working in Utah's organized
(26:45):
crime Investigations unit. He was experienced with uncooperative witnesses with deception,
yet when it came to lying, he noticed that these
LeBaron kids were good. They were pretty consistent in their stories.
No one seemed phase that a murder had occurred. And
(27:06):
my afterthought on that is, I mean, murder was sort
of a of a natural thing with these folks, and
I suppose teenagers live, but not quite so much about murder.
Having made little headway from their initial interviews with the
la Baron kids, the investigative team moved on to Aaron,
(27:27):
that tall, studious leader of the Kog, sometimes called Mo.
He was in police custody following the altercation with Gan
Jordan's family members. After the funeral. He talks to me,
but again he just lies to me the whole time.
And my main thing is, Okay, I know he's up
to something, but I don't know what it is. And
(27:47):
we couldn't find anything to time to any of the murders,
and we have to release him because we don't have
anything to hold him on. Reluctantly, the investigative team had
to move on from their questioning of all the kids.
The children were released into foster homes across the Salt
Lake area. But Aaron and Cynthia, the older teens, they
(28:07):
were free to go wherever they pleased. Given the circumstances,
none of the kids could have pulled the trigger. They
were all at the campsite, so there was nobody that
was traveling with them that had done anything as far
as anybody could tell. With the Labaron kids now in
foster homes and still not talking, and Aaron and Cynthia
(28:28):
in the wind, by November of eight seven, the investigative
team were making slow progress solving the Dan Jordan murder.
In Dan Jordan's there was a whole lot of physical evidence.
There was a body, there were rounds in the body.
It was clearly cause of death was gunshot. Manner of
death was homicide. So you caused manner of death. You've
(28:52):
got a whole bunch of circumstance and context. But who
pulled the trigger? No one was telling us that. Prosecutor
David Schwinderman knew that without decent physical evidence, cops like Steve,
a techie, would somehow need to get information from inside
the colt. But Steve was beginning to doubt his ability
(29:14):
to do that. We're kind of hoping that maybe somebody's
gonna want to talk to us, and that doesn't hold true.
I mean, here's the murder, and UH just can't come
up with anything. That's very frustrating. My gut's telling me,
you know, the investigations going nowhere, we don't have any evidence.
Everybody's lying to us, just just snut bowing anywhere. Then
(29:35):
two months later, a Sunday night, January, David Schwinderman's phone rings.
I got a call from the Marshal's that said, hey,
they're gone. One of the LeBaron children, Stephanie, Gabriella's sister,
had slipped away from her foster family. He said, they
(29:58):
haven't seen Stephanie today, and she was in the house
yesterday and they thought she was asleep in the house
and they went in to check she's not there. So
the marshals started to call around to all the other
places they had the kids. They were gone. All the
Labarian children disappeared. How did they arrange their escape? I mean,
(30:21):
are they calling each other up or you got it?
They phone each other and constantly kept themselves apprized of
what was going on in the families. Stephanie was told
to round the kids up to arrange for the kids
to meet, and there was no probably should have been,
but there were no real restrictions on the kids getting together.
(30:42):
So she got the kids together and Patrician Hebrew were
there and they loaded him up in the vehicle. She
took him back to Mexico and nobody saw him after that.
The KOG kids had all escaped back to Mexico to
meet up with the others. Investigators wouldn't learn who killed
(31:03):
Dan Jordan for years, and by the time they did,
it would be too late. That's coming up after the break.
(31:26):
Around the same time as KOG members were returning from
America to meet up with Gabriella LeBaron and her brothers
and sisters, the cult were on the move. The adults
were like, suddenly, there was this emergency. We got to go,
we got to get out of here. They were leaving
their Laya camp and traveling about three hundred and seventy
miles south, further away from the border, deeper into Cartel
(31:50):
controlled Sonora. Their destination was a town called Navajo. At
this point, Gabriella was twelve years old. It's a small own,
a typical little Mexico town that has a little square,
one tiny little store to go and buy, like your
gums or your coke or whatever, and a few houses
(32:12):
and a few streets. It had a elementary school, you know,
just maybe fifty homes with a hundred. There's a creek nearby,
so we could walk to the creek or walk to
the mountains. And everything was in walking distance. And then
outside of this little town was mountains and in all directions.
For the colt, this new home was known as b
(32:32):
f A. Do you guys know what that stood for? Never?
B f A stood for but fuck Africa, an acronym
used by isolated American kids to mean the middle of nowhere.
Although Hebrew, pulled out of school early, had got this
acronym wrong. It's usually referred to as bf E, the
(32:56):
E standing for Egypt. Hebre being in the coal didn't
know the difference, you know, Egypt or Africa. He's like
it was out in the freaking Bundhi, so he's like,
I don't freaking bf A, And it was just called
b ff as there and forever Africa Egypt. For the nomadic,
educationally deprived kids of the Kog, starved of normal childhood's aspirations,
(33:21):
or any of the regular possibilities for adult lives. These
weren't just far off exotic destinations. They were as tangible
as say, living on the moon. Cult members only had
two possible future destinations, outer darkness, that far off layer
(33:42):
of hell, or life in the violent, oppressive Kingdom of God,
the gateway to the highest levels of heaven. But for now,
in the present, as night seven turned into nine, the
thing that mattered about b f A wasn't its name.
(34:02):
It was its location, off the grid, away from the
growing team of law enforcement that were now on their trail.
Going to b f A was a place that nobody
would ever know. You know where we went. It was
definitely a secret place, and the only person who knew
where we went was the owner of the house, and
(34:25):
he was deep in them off yes, so he wasn't
going to talk to the police. According to Gabriella, everyone
in Navajos seemed to have marijuana plantations. She remembers that
if you lived there, you were an outlaw. The children
of the Kingdom of God fit in perfectly. Gabriella loved it.
(34:46):
I used to race horses. I would write it just
with the rope around its nose. And I would race
with the kids and the other kids in the street,
and we'd go down this one straight street that went
through the little town, and I always one, like way
far ahead of everybody else. I grew up with boys,
and I outdid them on everything in any kind of game,
(35:07):
any kind of fight, any kind of raising, any kind
of anything. And um, I didn't have this element of fear.
It was kind of busted in me. So I just
like a Tasmanian deviled, just nothing will hold back. Hebrew
had kept up with a car stealing operation and the
marijuana smuggling. We were making a lot of money for
a period. Like selling cars was really luk ative for
(35:31):
a while there. I remember seeing big giant wad to
cash and then we would go to Navajoa to do
our shopping and buy boxes of delicious, glorious food, like
mangoes was my favorite thing in the world. Oh my god.
It would buy big grates and mangoes, tortillas with hot
trtias with butter on that, and I was like, oh
so delicious. So it just kind of feel like a
(35:52):
time of plenty then or suddenly you've got all this
money and you're eating really good. Yeah, yeah, it was.
It was really and we had fancy trunks all the time,
and we would go drive around in the mud and
big giant broncos. But this wasn't a period of healing
for Gabriella. On the outside, she might have been some
(36:12):
fearless Tasmanian devil who would beat boys and horse races
and pack weed and hidden compartments. But inside everything was
shut like in the basement. Any kind of suffering, any
kind of feelings, any kind of anything was in the
basement and sealed. I didn't feel anything for a long time.
(36:32):
That's one of the reasons why I couldn't feel fear.
I couldn't feel anything. That mean you also didn't feel happiness.
I felt excitement. I could feel excitement, but this sense
of like content, safety, happiness, what things are going okay?
I had no concept of that whatsoever. The group consciousness
(36:54):
was we were required to do certain things, so sure
I could be excited about adventure, but we always had
to study. There was this underlying You're here to do
God's will. End of story. God's will learn from irvil
(37:14):
LeBaron's Book of the New Covenant and it's call for
vengeance on all his enemies, which meant down in Deepest
Sonora with Dan Jordan's disposed of plannings were happening, and
they were happening when we were in b f a
further adventures back across the border in the US. As
(37:37):
a kid, you sit there and you be quiet. On
their knees. Together, the children of irvil LeBaron would face
each other, heads bowed. We would pray and pray for hours,
all of us together in a circle. We would kneel,
(38:03):
we put our hands behind our backs, and different people
would pray. And we had this thing we called a
solemn assembly where each person in that circle would say
their prayer and nobody could cut them short if they
were long winded, if they're twenty long witted people that
we would be there for hours and you just had
to second up when you guys would do those prayers.
(38:25):
I'm just trying to imagine what would the prayers be like.
They would be specifically about the killings. Yes, and they
would say these long winded prayers and never freaking ended.
In the spring of the plan the kog were praying
for was their most audacious killing yet, a chilling, coordinated attack,
(38:48):
an evolution of sorts in the sophistication and scale of brutality,
not a one off like Jola Baron or a random
series of executions like the massacre at Los Molinos with
more targets than their semi aborted attempt at the double
(39:09):
ruling Alred and Virlin Le Baron assassination. This next plan
was something much grander. I was allowed it on one
of the meetings and they were trying to decide location
and when and where. I just know the feeling of
the meeting. It was all like, of course, very ominous,
(39:30):
and they were deciding which kids would go to the
United States, and I wanted to go so bad, and
they wouldn't let me. I was a girl, so I
thought it was unfair. I trusted myself and they didn't
trust me, and I didn't like that at all. A
hit squad was being assembled. Some of their names you've
(39:50):
already heard. Cynthia the Diva, Hebrew the failed Leader, Aaron,
studious and tall, and their sister Patricia the cool one,
and a kid called Richard LeBaron. All of them chosen
to carry out the murders that would change everything and
(40:11):
wake the prosecutors and cops from their slumbering investigation into
the cult. You know, keep thinking who would do something
like that? And I never could couldn't believe that somebody
would actually target a little girl like that. That's coming
up in episode eleven of deliver Us from Herville. Deliver
(40:43):
Us from Herville is hosted by me jesse Hyde and
written and reported by me Leona Hamid and David Waters.
Production from Leona Hamid and David Waters. Sean Glenn and
Max O'Brien are executive producers. Lena Chang and Megan Yinka
are researchers. Marianna Gongora is our field producer. Fact checking
(41:06):
by Donya Suleman and Sona Avakian. Production management from Sharie Houston,
Frankie Taylor and Charlotte Wolf. Austin Mitchell is our creative
director of production. Michae Lee Raw is our managing editor.
Gavin Haynes is our head of Development. Willard Foxton is
our creative director of Development. Sound design, mixing and scoring
(41:29):
by Nicholas Alexander and Daniel Kempson. Music supervision by Nicholas
Alexander and David Waters. Our music is composed by Julian Lynch.
Special thanks to Scott Anderson, Scott Carrier del van Ada,
Pippa Smith, Saskia Edwards, Matt O'Mara, Katrina Norvelle and beth
An Makaluso. Or In Rosenbaum, Shelby Shankman, and all the
(41:53):
team at UTA. For more from Novel, visit novel dot
audio
Novel. A listener note this episode contains violence and content
that some listeners might find distressing. Previously, on deliver Us
from Herbal Hebrew, the mantle fell on him and he
(00:27):
did not sign up for it. Everybody was a crazy, little,
freaking spartan extremist terrorist, not knowing anything else in the world.
Shooting the guns is not the traumatic part. The traumatic
part is that you're actually going to be faced with
a major war and you might have to shoot people,
(00:47):
so you can't have any kind of feelings. You can
have any soft feelings. I just remember the gun pointing
at me, seeing the gun, and he said, give me
your money, and I emptied my or and put all
the money in there, including my die pack, which he
told me not to do. Heber felt he had screwed
up so bad when he had the authority, he gave
(01:09):
the authority to the next Brethren line Mo also called Aaron.
He was the one that was like the moral compass
for us, studying hard and praying and making sure we
were well verse in our own doctrine. This is God's law.
We have to do it, otherwise the whole world will
(01:30):
go to hell like the Armageddon. Satan will win in
the end if we don't do this. We're in Old Harbor, Washington,
(01:50):
about ninety miles north of Seattle, on an island called
Woodbey Island. We're specifically at a location called pam Cove.
We have the wonderful water view these days. Steve Voteci
lives way out in Washington State. On clear days, you
can see the Olympic Mountains over there. You can see
Commano Island over there. With a glass of wine on
(02:13):
the deck. Here they watch the sunset just be bright red.
It's it's a beautiful time. Looking around his home on
the water's edge, I see his deck a picture window
where you can spot orca is in the bay. Sometimes
a great well bald headed eagles visit to feeding on
clams and on the walls of his home, old family
(02:34):
snapshots and mementos from his life. Uh, what do I have, hero,
there's me. It's five years old. The atmosphere here feels peaceful, serene,
that is until he shows me a picture from his
past life back in the nineties. This is my jail
mug shot to establish my credentials as an unsavory character. Yeah,
(02:58):
that's me, Steve. Even prison overalls, but he wasn't really
a convict. He was an undercover cop. As you run
into somebody, other investigators would take this out and show
just to some people who were trying to target inside.
If you're saying this guy, okay, I've got a love
with you, it's quite hard to imagine any amount of
(03:20):
undercover shape shifting could turn Steve into a convincing unsavory character.
No offense to Steve, but his manner is well, I
don't know, kind of cuddly. In fact, it's like his home, warm, welcoming.
Occasionally you spot a little knowing twinkle in his eye,
(03:42):
like the light catching on the pencove water. I think
it was his demeanor rather than his disguises, that made
Steve so good at his job. People opened up to him,
wanted to talk like they just couldn't help themselves, which
was a real asset in his role working investigations for
(04:05):
the Organized Crime Bureau in Utah. And so you think, oh, Utah,
j they can't much crime in Utah, But the polygamous
met the definition of organized crime. What Steve is talking
about here is that underground network of polygamous communities that
I've mentioned in previous episodes, the ones that had shot
(04:29):
up like weeds around the same time hervil LeBaron was
also building his cult. They were the groups hervill coveted
and wanted to consume, and who were frankly much more
successful at quietly going about their work. I've spent much
of my career reporting on these Mormon fundamentalist communities, their
groups with their own hierarchies, rules, and rituals operating in
(04:52):
the shadows, and by the eighties, some of these groups
weren't just engaging in the crime of polygamy. Some were
committing viole crimes. Part of Steve's job as a cop
was to keep tabs on the various polygamust sex in Utah.
He's not a Mormon himself, but it didn't seem to matter.
(05:13):
People often seem to want to talk to Steve despite themselves.
It was working this job in that Steve got a
call from his bosses asking him to visit a polygamist,
yet another self styled prophet. There were some threats made
against Dan Jordan's and so I went out to his
(05:33):
home to interview him. Dan Jordan's once hervil Le Baron's
right hand man, the man who had killed Joel le
Baron at rbl's orders and started off the whole spiral
of the Colt. In his career investigating Mormon polygamus, Steve
had heard all about the infamous and now deceased Hervil
(05:54):
LeBaron from the perspective of most law enforcement. At this
point in the mid eight d's, his cult had been
shut down, Hervil was already becoming a kind of historical curiosity,
and so here was an opportunity to go sort of
interview one of the lieutenants of rural LeBaron and just
(06:15):
see what the set up was. Daniel ben Jordan's was
a short and stout man with a fleshy face, receding hairline,
dark dead eyes. He was fifty six and eighty five,
but he was the kind of man that had always
looked kind of middle aged, even in his early twenties
(06:38):
when he first arrived in colonial le Baron as one
of those French but not actually French missionaries, the new
blood whose appearance would energize the town. Back then, I've
heard he was always at Hervil side, but by the
time Irvill was arrested in nineteen seventy nine, though their
families were bound by marriages. Dan had started a question
(07:00):
and if Herville really did carry the mantle of the
one mighty and Strong one. Cervill was safely locked up,
that is, and when Herville was convicted their schism had
grown into a full blown split. Dan incorporated his own
church to Erville. He'd become a son of Perdition. His
(07:21):
name entered into the Book of the New Covenant's hit list.
Dan has been described to me as coming across as
a joyless man, someone who, apart from Hervil back in
the day, had few friends, a loner. But when Steve
arrived to meet him that day, it wasn't just Dan's
(07:44):
awkward demeanor that stood out on the surface. Everything seemed
just like the polygamous community Steve had spent his career visiting,
but the atmosphere felt off. I go into the charge
hall and they're probably about five or six young ladies there,
(08:04):
which we didn't do introductions, but I'm assuming that there
were his various wives. There were a number of children
there also, and it's just a little strange. I've been
to other families, and I mean there might be kids
in another room playing or something like that and laughing,
and I just sat down with Dan Jordan's and interviewed
in him and nobody's laughing, nobody's playing. It's just kind
(08:25):
of a strange setup. I mean, you go into home
and there's ten or fifteen children there, you'd expect there's
some laughter, maybe see some toys, but no, none of
that was there. And obviously everyone's been coached to not
talk to me. Steve quickly realized that getting good information
out of Dan was going to be difficult, but he
(08:47):
assumed the death threats Dan had been getting were something
to do with his history with Herville. I knew about
his background, and then I'm in there and I it's
like I'm dealing with a con man. I mean, I'm
asking questions and his answers are carefully weighed, and and
he's presenting the attitude of oh, there's no problem. This
is just some sort of normal setup. He's in control,
(09:10):
and so nobody's gonna bump him off like everyone else
in Herbal's colt, Dan Jordan's never talked to cops, not
about anything he thought might be useful to them. Anyway.
Four years had passed since VAL's death. Maybe he didn't
feel like his name appearing in the Book of the
(09:30):
New Covenant put him at risk anymore. My takeaway was
I didn't feel like there was a threat, and he
didn't really seem worried. So Dan wasn't worried, Steve wasn't worried.
Dust your hands off and move on. I felt like
I had made some connections, passed out my name, and
(09:51):
part of the ideas that things go bad later on
a least know somebody he could call um. But I
mean he never called. You have to say, in hindsight,
both Steve and Dan got it wrong that day, because
the next call Steve would get about Dan Jordan's was
to tell him he'd been shot to death from the
(10:17):
teams at Novel and I Heart Radio. This is deliver
Us from Herville, episode ten, the Book of Daniel. For
(10:37):
a man who had spent decades on the run, Bennett,
Colorado seemed like a nice, quiet place to settle down.
Situated in eastern Colorado, It's about thirty miles from Denver,
with the range of the Rocky Mountains jutting up into
the sky if you look west to the east, the
prairies and flat lands of the American Heartland. Dan Jordan
(11:00):
there after Ervil's death in and set up another one
of his appliance repair shops, which operated uneventfully for years.
Dan might have thought he could put the whole Labaron
saga behind him. Well, maybe not completely behind him, because
after Irvil's death he had given shelter to Anime Marston
(11:23):
Evil's fourth wife, and so he had a few of
Herbal LeBaron's children living within his polygamous clan and for
the Kingdom of God back in Mexico. This was a
festering wound, their siblings living with someone marked for death
by the Book of the New Covenant. What of our
(11:43):
lifelong dreams was to get our siblings who were under
Dan's spell. That's the way we saw it, get our siblings.
Editor Gabriella LeBaron and the children and teens of the
Kog deeply missed their siblings. I dreamed of them all
the time that we would be reunited with him. So
(12:04):
they were like our pride and joy in our love,
and we were ready to die for them, and we
were going to do whatever it took to bring him back,
to rescue them from hell and to have them come
and join us a much better hell. In eight seven
Gabriella was eleven years old and together with her brothers
and sisters, she had been scheming and we were going
(12:26):
to go and infiltrate and somehow convinced them to leave
and come back with us, so basically extricate them. This
was early in seven, but over the coming months the
Kog's plan to be permanently reunited with their Labarren siblings
evolved into something darker, albeit with the same ultimate aim.
(12:48):
It was actually Cynthia's idea, and she told Hebrew, and
Hebrew was since it was his job to take everybody
out and he had agreed to it, he had to
take advantage of the opportunity he had. It was a
summer's morning in August of eight seven that Dan Jordans
opened his front door to find seven of hervill La
(13:08):
Baron's children staring back at him. The group included labaronteenes
carrying infants in their arms. Cynthia and the leader of
the Kog, Aaron, Hebrew, Patricia and Gabriella stayed behind in Mexico.
I really wanted to go. I wanted to be a
part of the action so bad, and I wasn't allowed.
(13:32):
Arriving on the Jordan's doorstep, Aaron told Dan a heartbreaking story.
It went something like this. For several years, they've been
living down in Mexico at the Lahoya Ranch, first under
Arthur until he was killed. Now, he told Dan, Hebrew
was in charge, and they've been surviving a sort of
(13:54):
hellscape with gun battles and not enough to eat. If
that wasn't bad enough, Hebrew only thought of himself. He'd
abandoned them on the ranch and they were starving. They
knew Dan Jordan lived in Colorado and didn't know where
else to go. Aaron offered a deal in exchange for
(14:18):
food and shelter. They'd worked for Dan in his appliance
repair sweatshop. Dan Jordan's said, no, this is no, it's
not gonna work. These kids are coming up to do something.
I know how this all works. This is David Schwinderman.
He's a former federal prosecutor. Jordan's killed a couple of
people on Hervil's direction, and in fact, he killed Rubal's brother.
(14:40):
And he said to his wife, he said, book, this
is not gonna work. I know how this works. It's
not gonna be good for me. But Dan's wife persuaded
him to take in the Labaron orphans. After all, she said,
they'd escaped the clutches of hervil's colt and we're now
leading peaceful lives. What kind of leader would he be
(15:01):
if he didn't offer them a safe haven. And besides,
she reminded him this was some free sweatshop labor for
his appliance business, and that swung it because now he's
got more hands to do more work to bring it
more revenue. That's fine with him, because he's all about
the money. He agreed to take the kids in, although
(15:25):
from this point onward he started carrying a loaded nine
millimeter pistol in a shoulder holster just to be safe.
Only took it off to bathe or visit the bathroom.
And despite any suspicions, August, then September and the Jordan
family past uneventfully, the new recruits kept their heads down.
(15:46):
They're working in the family appliance business to bring it
more revenue, to get along. Really well. Everything's going fine
until that autumn, when the whole Jordan clan started getting
ready for a big annual family trip each year. Dan
closed up his repair shop for a few weeks to
go deer hunting. With the family over in Utah. Dan
(16:08):
didn't really want to take the new Labarn tines with them,
but he didn't trust them enough to leave them behind either,
so he decided to take some of them along. They
left on October fifteenth in a caravan, carrying a half
dozen of Dan's wives, fifteen of their children, and the
four oldest of the seven Labarn kids. They drove about
(16:34):
eight hours to the man Ti Lasoul National Forest in
central Utah. Dan picked a campsite not too far from
a dirt road. It was peaceful, surrounded by steep hillsides
on three sides. They gave the campsite the feel of
a sort of natural amphitheater. They set up The hunt
(16:55):
hasn't really started yet. It's to start the next day.
This is on October six. That Friday, the sound of
gun shots were echoing throughout the forest as hunters prepared
for the opening of hunting season. The Jordans were practicing
firing their guns too. At about two pm, Dan left
(17:16):
the family campsite and headed for an area they designated
as the communal bathroom. It was partially shielded from view
by trees. Dan goes off to do his business, drops
his drawers is in the process, and two people walk
(17:38):
up and she's him in the head in the chest
of the nine millimeter weapon. Two shots echo through the forest.
The people of the campsite just here, boom boom, and
they don't think anything of it because it's hunting season,
and they figure it's just somebody's discharged the weapon. But
(18:00):
as time passes, where's Dan. Somebody goes out when Dan
doesn't come back and discovers Dan's body with the bullet
hole in the head and a bull on the chest.
This was clearly no hunting accident. When the police arrive,
they have a mystery on their hands. Someone had murdered Dan,
(18:22):
but who turns out the killer wasn't anyone in Dan's
hunting party. In fact, the culprits didn't come from inside
the camp at all. Eyes had been watching Dan the
whole time, predators stalking their prey, waiting for the perfect
(18:42):
moment to pounce. That's coming up after the break. Two
days after the killing of Dan Jordan's a call came
into the State Police. It reached the desk of Steve Votechi.
(19:06):
My partner and I were down there to Manti. We
go to the crime scene that's out in the forest. Steve,
that gentle investigator for the Organized Crime Bureau in Utah
who had that strange interview with Dan, and now two
years later, he gazed out his squad car window as
his partner drove him to the crime scene. You drive there,
(19:28):
and said, I drive, And then you didn't leave the
paved road, and you drive about five miles on a
turn of her dirt road, and then we're in this
beautiful Champion spot. Votechie was there to investigate a murder,
but in what I've come to learn is his style,
he couldn't help but appreciate how picturesque the landscape was,
(19:48):
with the leaves turning red and bright yellow, the autumn
sun casting a golden light across the mountain. I'm looking
at it and I'm thinking, yes, i s place to camp.
And there was no one there when we got there,
so we're just looking in this beautiful spot and walked around.
There's a little river nearby and and it's really quite pleasant.
(20:10):
We sort of mapped out where we thought a shooter
might have hidden. It's sort of an open campground, and
there was a clumpetraes nearby, and and that we sort
of searched that very very carefully to see what was there.
Steve's initial investigation at the crime scene came up with zilch,
nothing to imply the killing was an inside job from
(20:31):
anyone at the camp, and since everyone had been firing
guns to practice for the hunting trip the next day,
they all had gun residue on their hands. Everyone who
had talked to the cops seemed to have an alibi.
Steve was stumped, but he knew the LeBaron's history felt
(20:53):
like there was more to this case that solving it
was going to require more resources than just the local
count the sheriff's office. So Steve decided to use the
one thing from the crime scene that had made an
impression on him, the beautiful location. It occurred in a
national forest, and then since any possible shooters were out
(21:15):
of state, it becomes obvious that this is an interstate
Dealence interstate, they have the resources to do this. If
you're in federal custody, they can take you anywhere in
the United States, and so it was very useful the
crime occurred on federal land. This enabled the investigation to
operate across the US with additional resources like experienced prosecutors
(21:39):
who knew how to get results in complex cases. That's
how David Schwindermann got involved. They get ahold of the U. S.
Attorney's office and they just said, Hey, Dave, are you
guys interested in is It's going to require more than
just our investigative resources to get this then, so how
about it? Can the FBI help back and you get involved?
(22:01):
So I got involved, and we began to put our
files together, our case together, and that all started to
come together. Then the investigation got a crucial new team member,
Steve knew Dick Forbes. Now, Dick was a specialist of
La Baron in history, so when the techy recognized the names,
(22:23):
he immediately got ahold of Dick. Dick Forbes, you'll remember
from earlier episodes, had played a key role in the
hunt and apprehension of Hervia le Baron, And because no
one knew more about the inner workings of the Colt
than Dick, there was no one who saw them as
a bigger threat. But what's more, Dick knew about the
(22:45):
Book of the New Covenant. A brother of Hervil LeBaron
in Utah had got ahold of a copy and alerted
Dick after reading its distressing contents on vengeance and violent retribution.
Soon now, Dick Forbes started to tell Steve vo Techie
and David Schwinderman just what they were up against. This
(23:07):
isn't just a random shooting. This is probably something to
do with the family. You need to interview all these people,
will get their photographs, will do whatever we need to do.
Will do the investigation. This needs to be done very thoroughly.
Dick Forbes, Steve Votechi, and David Swinderman would now become
the foundation of a crack team formed not just to
(23:30):
solve this cults murders, but to try and stop their
future crimes. Working in unison with the FBI, they were
about to give a fresh focus on the next generation
of Herbal's cult, which Dick had learned from his Labaran sources,
were now calling themselves the Kingdom of God the k
(23:51):
o G. As this investigative team was coming together, the
Jordan's family and the Labyrin teenagers who had joined them
on the hunting trip had all left Utah. It was
October eighteenth. The whole Jordan family the entourage was allowed
to go back to Colorado, and Dan's body was released
(24:14):
and they had the funeral in Colorado. But no sooner
was Dan Jordan in the ground than the Kog tried
to seize control of his clan after the funeral, and
that's where this internal fight kind of starts. With Dan
Jordan's dad, Aaron, the leader of the Kog, declares to
(24:34):
the Jordan family that he is now their leader. He
reveals himself as the one mighty and strong and tells
them they had better fall in line, and the Jordan
family eventually called the cops file a formal complaint against Aaron.
This is all the night of Dan Jordan's funeral, with
Aaron trying to assert his authority as a new patriarch
(24:58):
over everybody. He is reported for domestic abuse by the
family members to authorities in Denver. That's when Aaron's arrested.
With Aaron behind bars, the local cops scoop up the
other Kog members who had been staying with the Jordan's
and they alert David Schwindermann and we then got involved
(25:21):
and brought the kids back to Utah on material witness warrants.
With these Kog kids on material witness warrants, the federal
law enforcement team had access to talk to them. Steve
Otechie started to ask them about the day of Dan's
killing to see if his team could start to piece
(25:41):
together the sequence of events right up to the murder.
And I'm trying to come up with the diagram of
of where all these people were and Dance shot nearer,
where the trailers were camped, where the camper is, and
some people were in the trailer they didn't hear anything,
and other people were outside life sentient Aaron up on
(26:01):
the road. Uh, nobody hears anything suspicious, sees anything suspicious.
Steve starts to get the sense that these children are
not being straight with them. It's obvious that maybe some
statements have been rehearsed, and and I'm writing this all downs,
you know, so that they can be checked later on
in that and I'm just thinking, well, obviously somebody's not
(26:22):
telling the truth. I just can't imagine that nobody heard
any shooting. And it's always amazing that everybody seemed to
be somewhere else and nobody knows what happened whatsoever. Getting
to the bottom of lies was kind of Steve Votechi's forte.
Having spent years under cover, years working in Utah's organized
(26:45):
crime Investigations unit. He was experienced with uncooperative witnesses with deception,
yet when it came to lying, he noticed that these
LeBaron kids were good. They were pretty consistent in their stories.
No one seemed phase that a murder had occurred. And
(27:06):
my afterthought on that is, I mean, murder was sort
of a of a natural thing with these folks, and
I suppose teenagers live, but not quite so much about murder.
Having made little headway from their initial interviews with the
la Baron kids, the investigative team moved on to Aaron,
(27:27):
that tall, studious leader of the Kog, sometimes called Mo.
He was in police custody following the altercation with Gan
Jordan's family members. After the funeral. He talks to me,
but again he just lies to me the whole time.
And my main thing is, Okay, I know he's up
to something, but I don't know what it is. And
(27:47):
we couldn't find anything to time to any of the murders,
and we have to release him because we don't have
anything to hold him on. Reluctantly, the investigative team had
to move on from their questioning of all the kids.
The children were released into foster homes across the Salt
Lake area. But Aaron and Cynthia, the older teens, they
(28:07):
were free to go wherever they pleased. Given the circumstances,
none of the kids could have pulled the trigger. They
were all at the campsite, so there was nobody that
was traveling with them that had done anything as far
as anybody could tell. With the Labaron kids now in
foster homes and still not talking, and Aaron and Cynthia
(28:28):
in the wind, by November of eight seven, the investigative
team were making slow progress solving the Dan Jordan murder.
In Dan Jordan's there was a whole lot of physical evidence.
There was a body, there were rounds in the body.
It was clearly cause of death was gunshot. Manner of
death was homicide. So you caused manner of death. You've
(28:52):
got a whole bunch of circumstance and context. But who
pulled the trigger? No one was telling us that. Prosecutor
David Schwinderman knew that without decent physical evidence, cops like Steve,
a techie, would somehow need to get information from inside
the colt. But Steve was beginning to doubt his ability
(29:14):
to do that. We're kind of hoping that maybe somebody's
gonna want to talk to us, and that doesn't hold true.
I mean, here's the murder, and UH just can't come
up with anything. That's very frustrating. My gut's telling me,
you know, the investigations going nowhere, we don't have any evidence.
Everybody's lying to us, just just snut bowing anywhere. Then
(29:35):
two months later, a Sunday night, January, David Schwinderman's phone rings.
I got a call from the Marshal's that said, hey,
they're gone. One of the LeBaron children, Stephanie, Gabriella's sister,
had slipped away from her foster family. He said, they
(29:58):
haven't seen Stephanie today, and she was in the house
yesterday and they thought she was asleep in the house
and they went in to check she's not there. So
the marshals started to call around to all the other
places they had the kids. They were gone. All the
Labarian children disappeared. How did they arrange their escape? I mean,
(30:21):
are they calling each other up or you got it?
They phone each other and constantly kept themselves apprized of
what was going on in the families. Stephanie was told
to round the kids up to arrange for the kids
to meet, and there was no probably should have been,
but there were no real restrictions on the kids getting together.
(30:42):
So she got the kids together and Patrician Hebrew were
there and they loaded him up in the vehicle. She
took him back to Mexico and nobody saw him after that.
The KOG kids had all escaped back to Mexico to
meet up with the others. Investigators wouldn't learn who killed
(31:03):
Dan Jordan for years, and by the time they did,
it would be too late. That's coming up after the break.
(31:26):
Around the same time as KOG members were returning from
America to meet up with Gabriella LeBaron and her brothers
and sisters, the cult were on the move. The adults
were like, suddenly, there was this emergency. We got to go,
we got to get out of here. They were leaving
their Laya camp and traveling about three hundred and seventy
miles south, further away from the border, deeper into Cartel
(31:50):
controlled Sonora. Their destination was a town called Navajo. At
this point, Gabriella was twelve years old. It's a small own,
a typical little Mexico town that has a little square,
one tiny little store to go and buy, like your
gums or your coke or whatever, and a few houses
(32:12):
and a few streets. It had a elementary school, you know,
just maybe fifty homes with a hundred. There's a creek nearby,
so we could walk to the creek or walk to
the mountains. And everything was in walking distance. And then
outside of this little town was mountains and in all directions.
For the colt, this new home was known as b
(32:32):
f A. Do you guys know what that stood for? Never?
B f A stood for but fuck Africa, an acronym
used by isolated American kids to mean the middle of nowhere.
Although Hebrew, pulled out of school early, had got this
acronym wrong. It's usually referred to as bf E, the
(32:56):
E standing for Egypt. Hebre being in the coal didn't
know the difference, you know, Egypt or Africa. He's like
it was out in the freaking Bundhi, so he's like,
I don't freaking bf A, And it was just called
b ff as there and forever Africa Egypt. For the nomadic,
educationally deprived kids of the Kog, starved of normal childhood's aspirations,
(33:21):
or any of the regular possibilities for adult lives. These
weren't just far off exotic destinations. They were as tangible
as say, living on the moon. Cult members only had
two possible future destinations, outer darkness, that far off layer
(33:42):
of hell, or life in the violent, oppressive Kingdom of God,
the gateway to the highest levels of heaven. But for now,
in the present, as night seven turned into nine, the
thing that mattered about b f A wasn't its name.
(34:02):
It was its location, off the grid, away from the
growing team of law enforcement that were now on their trail.
Going to b f A was a place that nobody
would ever know. You know where we went. It was
definitely a secret place, and the only person who knew
where we went was the owner of the house, and
(34:25):
he was deep in them off yes, so he wasn't
going to talk to the police. According to Gabriella, everyone
in Navajos seemed to have marijuana plantations. She remembers that
if you lived there, you were an outlaw. The children
of the Kingdom of God fit in perfectly. Gabriella loved it.
(34:46):
I used to race horses. I would write it just
with the rope around its nose. And I would race
with the kids and the other kids in the street,
and we'd go down this one straight street that went
through the little town, and I always one, like way
far ahead of everybody else. I grew up with boys,
and I outdid them on everything in any kind of game,
(35:07):
any kind of fight, any kind of raising, any kind
of anything. And um, I didn't have this element of fear.
It was kind of busted in me. So I just
like a Tasmanian deviled, just nothing will hold back. Hebrew
had kept up with a car stealing operation and the
marijuana smuggling. We were making a lot of money for
a period. Like selling cars was really luk ative for
(35:31):
a while there. I remember seeing big giant wad to
cash and then we would go to Navajoa to do
our shopping and buy boxes of delicious, glorious food, like
mangoes was my favorite thing in the world. Oh my god.
It would buy big grates and mangoes, tortillas with hot
trtias with butter on that, and I was like, oh
so delicious. So it just kind of feel like a
(35:52):
time of plenty then or suddenly you've got all this
money and you're eating really good. Yeah, yeah, it was.
It was really and we had fancy trunks all the time,
and we would go drive around in the mud and
big giant broncos. But this wasn't a period of healing
for Gabriella. On the outside, she might have been some
(36:12):
fearless Tasmanian devil who would beat boys and horse races
and pack weed and hidden compartments. But inside everything was
shut like in the basement. Any kind of suffering, any
kind of feelings, any kind of anything was in the
basement and sealed. I didn't feel anything for a long time.
(36:32):
That's one of the reasons why I couldn't feel fear.
I couldn't feel anything. That mean you also didn't feel happiness.
I felt excitement. I could feel excitement, but this sense
of like content, safety, happiness, what things are going okay?
I had no concept of that whatsoever. The group consciousness
(36:54):
was we were required to do certain things, so sure
I could be excited about adventure, but we always had
to study. There was this underlying You're here to do
God's will. End of story. God's will learn from irvil
(37:14):
LeBaron's Book of the New Covenant and it's call for
vengeance on all his enemies, which meant down in Deepest
Sonora with Dan Jordan's disposed of plannings were happening, and
they were happening when we were in b f a
further adventures back across the border in the US. As
(37:37):
a kid, you sit there and you be quiet. On
their knees. Together, the children of irvil LeBaron would face
each other, heads bowed. We would pray and pray for hours,
all of us together in a circle. We would kneel,
(38:03):
we put our hands behind our backs, and different people
would pray. And we had this thing we called a
solemn assembly where each person in that circle would say
their prayer and nobody could cut them short if they
were long winded, if they're twenty long witted people that
we would be there for hours and you just had
to second up when you guys would do those prayers.
(38:25):
I'm just trying to imagine what would the prayers be like.
They would be specifically about the killings. Yes, and they
would say these long winded prayers and never freaking ended.
In the spring of the plan the kog were praying
for was their most audacious killing yet, a chilling, coordinated attack,
(38:48):
an evolution of sorts in the sophistication and scale of brutality,
not a one off like Jola Baron or a random
series of executions like the massacre at Los Molinos with
more targets than their semi aborted attempt at the double
(39:09):
ruling Alred and Virlin Le Baron assassination. This next plan
was something much grander. I was allowed it on one
of the meetings and they were trying to decide location
and when and where. I just know the feeling of
the meeting. It was all like, of course, very ominous,
(39:30):
and they were deciding which kids would go to the
United States, and I wanted to go so bad, and
they wouldn't let me. I was a girl, so I
thought it was unfair. I trusted myself and they didn't
trust me, and I didn't like that at all. A
hit squad was being assembled. Some of their names you've
(39:50):
already heard. Cynthia the Diva, Hebrew the failed Leader, Aaron,
studious and tall, and their sister Patricia the cool one,
and a kid called Richard LeBaron. All of them chosen
to carry out the murders that would change everything and
(40:11):
wake the prosecutors and cops from their slumbering investigation into
the cult. You know, keep thinking who would do something
like that? And I never could couldn't believe that somebody
would actually target a little girl like that. That's coming
up in episode eleven of deliver Us from Herville. Deliver
(40:43):
Us from Herville is hosted by me jesse Hyde and
written and reported by me Leona Hamid and David Waters.
Production from Leona Hamid and David Waters. Sean Glenn and
Max O'Brien are executive producers. Lena Chang and Megan Yinka
are researchers. Marianna Gongora is our field producer. Fact checking
(41:06):
by Donya Suleman and Sona Avakian. Production management from Sharie Houston,
Frankie Taylor and Charlotte Wolf. Austin Mitchell is our creative
director of production. Michae Lee Raw is our managing editor.
Gavin Haynes is our head of Development. Willard Foxton is
our creative director of Development. Sound design, mixing and scoring
(41:29):
by Nicholas Alexander and Daniel Kempson. Music supervision by Nicholas
Alexander and David Waters. Our music is composed by Julian Lynch.
Special thanks to Scott Anderson, Scott Carrier del van Ada,
Pippa Smith, Saskia Edwards, Matt O'Mara, Katrina Norvelle and beth
An Makaluso. Or In Rosenbaum, Shelby Shankman, and all the
(41:53):
team at UTA. For more from Novel, visit novel dot
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